I'll Never Write Again!

"I'll never write again!"

The words were aimed at a notebook I had just snatched it from his hands.

"Don't be ridiculous," he answered. His voice had taken on the cool of a lion tamer in the face of a raging, unpredictable beast.

I wanted to dig my claws into the pages, into him - my own father - for not bringing to light that I was a natural, a boy wonder, a fifteen year old who wrote like a man of forty.

He talked some more, until I bid him a diplomatic goodbye and boarded the bus back to my mother's. She'd be complaining about how the booze she was holding was burning a small hole in her chest. For the first time ever, I would know how she felt.

How tempting it was to liberate each page from the flimsy metal rings that confined them to narrative coherence, and to let the wind from the bus window do with them what it would. I could see them populating the downtown streets, like paper pigeons. But I didn't do it.

I got home, bid my mother hello, and went up to my room. I examined the white pages of my script, and held each one with a mix of tenderness, pain and resolve, like Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront, cradling his dead birds. I see, you can hear him saying behind the eyes in that famous sequence, so now I know the true scale of what I'm up against.

I put the notebook in a drawer, then sat down to write. I paused, rose, and let the drawer out just an inch or two. I wanted it, my father's eye, to see me, see me write and write and write. I wrote remembering the final images of the film: Brando, bruises and blood...triumphant.